VINCENT HONORE

Vincent Honoré is an independent curator and writer based in Paris and London. He was a curator at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2001-2004) and Tate Modern in London (2004-2007). He is currently the founding director and curator of the David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), one of the largest private foundations in London. In 2011, Honoré co-founded Drawing Room Confessions, a contemporary art series of books dedicated to one artist per issue, based on conversations and words only. He is a frequent contributor to Mousse and Cura magazines and has written a number of texts for catalogues and magazines as well as exhibitions in art galleries and museums around the globe.

Quentin Meillassoux. Le Nombre et la sirène. Paris: Fayard, 2011.

I first heard about Quentin Meillassoux in a train, when artist Benoît Maire introduced me to his concept of “co-existence” on our way to install an exhibition at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. I didn’t know about him at the École Normale Supérieure. At that time I had not read his 2006 essay After Finitude, a short but ambitious book that sparked the birth of a new philosophical dynamic, “speculative realism.” Meillassoux is not interested in “what is, but what can possibly be,” along the way rediscovering a philosophy of the absolute. There is no need, no law, that cannot collapse. Le Nombre et la sirène, his second book, is the most radical and exciting essay ever published about Mallarmé. Meillassoux deconstructs the testamentary great poem by Mallarmé and finds it to contain a hidden code. He then writes a rigorous essay emphasizing the extraordinary operation of mind incurred by the poet: the absolute of poetry fundamentally merging with the absurd of the contingence.

Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

More than an exhibition’s catalogue, this book is an A to Z of contemporaneity. In 1996 The Centre Georges Pompidou commissioned Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois to make an exhibition and a book. They offered a radical reading of modern art through the ‘formless.’ Modernism is an interpretation of the history of modern art as a triumphant sequence starting with Manet and his “indifference to the subject.” Opposing this was an attention to the content characterized by the omnipresence of the human body. Beyond this antinomy of form and content, Krauss and Bois brilliantly uncover a third way to assess an aesthetic modernity: formless, as defined by Georges Bataille in 1929, as an act of declassing and displacement, an act of belittling and putting the disorder in any taxonomy, of canceling the oppositions on which the logical and categorical thinking is based (form and content, but form and matter, inside and outside, etc.). Looking at recent developments in contemporary art, especially the works of artists born in the 1980s, this book reveals itself as a premonitory and crucial landmark in art history.

John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

When John Cage published his book Silence in 1961 (a collection of essays, notes, poetries and anecdotes about the concept and perception of silence), the intention was to reconsider the notions of silence and to inscribe it as a musical sign in itself. In this book, Cage attempts to show that silence is a musical term fully belonging to musical language, albeit a particular one, but as meaningful as any other musical sign. Silence eventually is the sign that can represent all sounds, freed from any connection and any place. This definition of silence as a musical sign allows us to reconsider the definition of music and the cultural expectations attached to it. Silence with Cage becomes an artwork, an ethics of the immediate, a temporal and spatial structure. Cage reverses something often viewed as a negative and elevates it to one of the fundamental structures of his work. This book had been crucial in my curatorial development for understanding the value one should attach to voids, pauses and silences in an exhibition.